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Microsoft seems to have written a new scheduler for handling tasks better in 8, and it works, but the priority settings now mean different things, and anything below the redesigned "Realtime" setting means it's handled in a way that is not suitable for audio playback on some ASIO drivers, so it pops at every latency. The easiest solution is to add ALL of the priority options to the ASIO component instead of just having a tickbox for "high priority."

Well, the problem is that foobar closes/reopens ASIO host every time you start to play song, or when the song is paused/stopped, and it's priority is reset to normal or high which is not enough to work without problems under Win8. So I made a little tray tool to detect and set/keep ASIOhost32.exe or ASIOhost64.exe priority to realtime. Will test it today, and if everything would work I'll share it here.

Well, here it is. It works OK for me using foobar 1.1.16, ASIO 2.1.2, Asus Xonar ST with Unixonar driver 1.64 and Windows 8 Pro x64. You can put this to your startup if you want. You can download it from here. Disclaimer: use it on your own responsibility.

Edit: just found there could be multiple asiohosts opened at the same time in foobar. e.g. if you open asio properties from settings while playing music through asio out, or vice versa. Only the first (oldest) asiohost process will be set to realtime priority. I have no intention to deal with that 'coz messing with the ASIO settings while playing music is not something we should be doing anyway. Hope foobar will get an option to set ASIO host realtime priority in some future release, so this tool would become unnecessary.

Would be really nice if such an option to set asio host priority to realtime would be implemented in some future release.

This is just to report that I experienced that ASIO host real time priority is crucial for ASIO Lynx driver running in win 7. Even in a system where latency looks not to be an issue.

Infact, I was looking for a workaround for my Lynx two B card (thanks for the nice piece of software). I strongly encourage to implement real time priority choice in foobar ASIO tab. As far as I checked in my system (Athlon 64x2 3600+) it does not affect stability.

Check your anti-virus/firewall settings. Some cause high DPC latencies on network interfaces when surfing the web and even more so when torrrenting. This causes the system to be unable to process audio/low latency tasks properly. When you encounter this issue a next time use LatencyMon to see if/which drivers are causing the high DPC latency. In my case Avast Internet Security's Firewall caused ndis.sys (network driver interface) latency to spike. Malwarebytes Anti-Malware's Malicious website blocking feature does as well. My 'solution' (more like a workaround) was uninstalling the Avast firewall and revert to using Windows 8.1's built in firewall and disabling the malicious website blocking* in MBAM.

Microsoft seems to have written a new scheduler for handling tasks better in 8, and it works, but the priority settings now mean different things, and anything below the redesigned "Realtime" setting means it's handled in a way that is not suitable for audio playback on some ASIO drivers, so it pops at every latency. The easiest solution is to add ALL of the priority options to the ASIO component instead of just having a tickbox for "high priority."

Which latency buffer are you talking about ... ASIO I/O buffer or foobar2k playback buffer?